Over 140 million workers worldwide are telecommuting at least part-time."-

"Work is something I do, not somewhere I go."

Today, change is transforming the workplace. The nature of work itself is changing and workers, particularly women are demanding more flexibility in their work schedules to allow them to balance work with their family and home demands. This has coincided with companies' realization that much is to be gained from supporting a teleworking model, not the least of which is the increased job satisfaction and retention of its female employees, which has a direct, positive impact on companies' bottom line.

First, business itself has moved from local to global, which has contributed to breaking down barriers to employees working from different places, taking advantage of increased mobility or to meet worker's needs. The work model also is evolving from hierarchal to flat, from departments to cross functional, and from individuals to teams, who may no longer produce a widget, but develop an outcome through shared ideas and collaboration across cities or continents. Today, companies have the technology to allow workers to collaborate simultaneously and effectively from different locations. With sales forces on the road from Buffalo to Tokyo, with engineers in Boston working with production managers in Taiwan and experts checking in from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, it is only common sense that teleworking should increasingly become the business model.

Teleworking and flextime have long been on the agenda of women who wished to find a way to balance work and family. Single mothers often wish to work at home to be able to spend more time with their children or to avoid a long commute. Married women who must do 70% of the household work, often need the flexibility to take their children to school and pick them up, but they are more than willing to make up the lost time and work into the evening. More and more, managers are convinced that it's the completion of the job which matters, and a positive outcome, not whether someone was watching over your shoulder as you did it. More than likely, your supervisor can not physically see whether people or working or not, or whether they are surfing the Net, day-dreaming or hanging out at the water cooler, even if the worker is firmly planted in the office.

Although a major shift in attitude has been required, and is still taking place, managers who are open minded recognize that it is not as important to travel to an office to sit in a cube as it is to be able to exchange ideals, information and knowledge in a collaborative environment. It is not as effective to judge people's performance by watching them sit in a chair, as it is to evaluate the results of their performance.

In today's fiercely competitive environment, telework and flextime just make good business sense. With scarce talent pools, the increased cost of real estate and geographically dispersed work groups, telework is a logical alternative to the old "everyone in the home office" model. The fact that it increases worker satisfaction, and retention, adds to the bottom line and allows women to remain home, for the most part, and still do productive work in a newly flexible environment is an outcome women have been seeking for years.